Introduction by Paul Smith

"Only someone with 'The Gift' can be psychic!" "True intuitives are born, not made." "If you haven't got the ability to be clairvoyant, you're out of luck. It's not something you can learn, you either have it, or you don't."

Sound familiar? This is what most people believe about "being psychic." That's what they've been told, that's how things are portrayed on television or on the screen, that's how such things are laid out too many books and magazine stories. You have to be 'special,' you have to be 'gifted' and if you are not one of those chosen few, then you are just like the rest of unwashed humanity: psychic as a brick. The only way you'll ever have surprising insights or detailed intuitions (the kind that are unexplainable by science) is by paying some gifted psychic to have them for you.

I'm here to tell you that's wrong. Not about the 'being gifted' part you do have to be gifted to use the powers of your mind to perceive things out of space and out of time, to be able to know what's on the other side of a wall you've never seen beyond, to know what's in a country you've never visited, or to perceive what happened at a certain day and place in the past before you were even born. The catch is, you are gifted. Every human has been innately blessed with this remarkable ability. Like any other developable skill, though, you just have to know how to get at it.

"So," you ask. "Isn't saying 'everyone is gifted' kind of like saying 'everyone is superior' which means, of course, that no one is?"

Nope, it's not the same. Just because everyone has the ability doesn't mean it isn't a wonderful gift all the same, in same way that normal, physical vision is a gift that nearly everyone has the benefit of. However, some are naturally better at "getting at it" than are others. Back in the days when you were on your own to develop psychic skills, people who had the knack of "getting at" their underlying abilities came to be thought of as "gifted" psychically. But they were gifted only in the sense that they figured it out without much if any help. Then, of course, they jealously guarded the secret to protect their monopoly. Fortunately for the evolution of human consciousness, all that has begun to change.

What am I talking about? Nothing less than the liberation of human consciousness from the elitism of both the "occultists," who want to hide this marvelous human power and preserve it for themselves, and the "materialists," who are absolutely sure and want you to be sure as well that this ability doesn't exist. I'm talking about remote viewing.

In 1972 something quite remarkable happened. Hard scientists partnered with America's top spy agency, the CIA, to see if human consciousness could be pressed into service in America's defense. The Soviets, after all, were spending hundreds of millions of dollars researching paranormal and related phenomena. Surely the US government could spare a measly $50,000 to see what the Russkies were up to?

This research, under Hal Puthoff, Ph.D., and Russell Targ at the Stanford Research Institute (later "SRI-International") began by studying "gifted" psychics as they performed what at the time was newly-named 'remote viewing' experiments, a term coined by Ingo Swann, the first person to begin to understand this ability and apply it in a methodical way.. The scientists decided that remote viewing was the ability of some humans to gain impressions and form perceptions of objects, people, locations, or events that are separated from the perceiver by distance, shielding, or time, using mental powers alone. In other words, at least some people could perceive real things mentally without their senses being directly involved at all. It seemed to be a form of clairvoyance.

Since these were to be scientific experiments, non-psychics were used as "controls" against which to compare the performance of the "gifted." The non-psychics would do the same sorts of experiments as the "gifted" ones but were not expected to be successful.

Only, funny things happened. Even these "non-gifted" folks were able to do as well as the "gifted" ones on many of the experiments. They just didn't succeed as often or as predictably. Puthoff, Targ, and their scientist-colleagues were puzzled or maybe "astonished" would be a better word. Could it be that psychic 'talent' was more widespread among humans than originally thought? Maybe it wasn't true that only a "gifted few" could work miracles with their minds.

After many such CIA-funded experiments, the scientists drew this conclusion: "Such observations indicate a hypothesis that remote viewing may be a latent and widely-distributed perceptual ability." In other, less scientific-sounding words, maybe everybody can be "psychic."

There were many more experiments, and even real-world missions where SRI's remote viewers were able to 'bring back' information about foreign military and research facilities important for US intelligence agencies to know about. More things came to be learned about this seemingly "magic" thing called remote viewing. For one, people seemed to get better that is, be right more often about details of the target with practice. For another, it was possible to teach people who had never tried it before some of the processes and techniques of experienced remote viewers. Those people could then be more successful in their experiments, too. Also, the scientists learned new details about how human perception works during remote viewing sessions and these things, too, could be taught to budding remote viewers. Meanwhile, with help from SRI the US Army was developing its own operational remote viewing unit that is, a small military organization whose job it was not to research remote viewing, but to use it regularly to try to discover the secrets of the Soviets, the Chinese, or other possible threats or competitors overseas.

This unit had no pool of "talented" psychics to recruit from, but only more or less ordinary soldiers and government civilians. It needed a way to teach these military men and women how to "get at" their underlying psychic faculties without having the luxury of time for long trial-and- error learning experiences. The researchers at SRI-International helped them with this. Even with several years of experience, though, the training process was still fairly rudimentary in 1979 when the first Army remote viewers came on board. Despite this, the Army viewers did remarkably well, and some of their exploits from that era are still talked about today.

A uniform, structured training regimen was still missing. Fortunately, one was in the wings. The SRI staff had been working for years documenting the lessons-learned, conducting controlled experiments, and learning more and more about the human sensory and perceptual systems, and about human psychology. In particular, Dr. Puthoff had been working closely with Ingo Swann for years, testing the many ways remote viewing could be done, keeping track of which methods worked and which didn't. When this knowledge was merged with all the other facts painstakingly marshaled in the SRI lab, an overall training concept began to take shape.

Beginning in 1981, SRI started to formulate the first stage of what would become a six-stage training process designed to bring someone from the "psychic as a brick" state all the way to making models of target sites over the course of several months. By 1982, the scientists felt confident enough to offer this training program to the Army's Intelligence and Security Command, which was the parent headquarters to the fledgling operational remote viewing unit. This was happy timing, as the Army was now looking for a more efficient way to train the next generation of military remote viewers. The Army contracted with SRI to begin teaching military volunteer students CRV. Ingo Swann was to be the instructor.

The first soldiers to be trained in what SRI was now calling "Coordinate Remote Viewing," or CRV, started in the fall of 1982. The next set started in January 1984. The training consisted of exhaustive lectures, followed by many "hands-on" remote viewing sessions as each "stage" of the CRV process was drilled into the students to the point of becoming not just automatic, but almost instinctive. As one of those students, I remember how laborious that work could be, yet also how exhilarating, as miraculous correspondences emerged between previously unknown targets and the perceptions emerging from the recesses of my own mind. Before it was all over, I knew without a doubt that consciousness was more than just the sum total of electron firings or the surge of chemical soup in a human brain.

By the time the training contract with SRI-International was through, political currents threatened to wash away any vestige of the remote viewing program from the Army. Working with a major change looming before us, we knew that no further training contract with SRI was likely for the future. If other soldiers were to be trained in CRV, we would have to be the ones to carry it on. Four of the five who had been trained began work to document what we had learned so we could pass on to our own "next generation." Using our extensive notes, some session transcripts we had access to, and our fresh recollections, we pooled our knowledge-base and I set to work writing the manuscript of what was to become the "Coordinate Remote Viewing" training manual, published in a 30-document limited printing by the Defense Intelligence Agency on May 1, 1986. By this time, we had left the Army's embrace and DIA had become our new master. We also had new CRV trainees, some of whose names will be familiar to many readers: Lyn Buchanan, Mel Riley, Gabrielle Pettingell and, later, David Morehouse. There were others, but their names do not yet have public currency. In all except Lyn's case, whose CRV training took place before the manual was fully composed, we used the manual as a guide to instruction.

Two questions usually come up about the CRV manual. The first is, "How accurately does it capture what Ingo Swann taught the Army's remote viewers?" The answer to this is easy. Even before the manual was printed, Capt. F. Holmes "Skip" Atwater, the training and operations officer for the remote viewing unit (and the one officer most responsible for creation of the unit in the first place) bundled up the CRV manual final manuscript and sent it off to Ingo Swann for his perusal. Mr. Swann shortly replied with a letter, dated 16 April 1986, in which he said:

I've received and read through the material you sent along - and you've done me great honor in taking the time and effort to produce such a comprehensive and accurate document. I don't think I could have done this as clearly as you have and you have my deepest thanks. If nothing else, the document at least attests to the efficacy of the training method itself.

To be sure, the manual wasn't perfectly accurate. There were typos and some minor misstatements. And we inadvertently left out a few things for example, one of the "breaks" that should have been listed on pp. 15-16, the so-called "miss" break, which signifies that the viewer has "missed" connecting with the signal line, and should be given the coordinate again to restart the session. (I find it highly ironic that we missed the "miss" break!) Nonetheless, as a codification of the heart and soul of CRV, the manual fulfilled its mission. [Special note: for this Filament Books version of the manual, several of these missing pieces have been added, making this edition of the manual the most complete available anywhere.]

A second question that comes up about the manual is, "Can I learn remote viewing just by reading through it?" The answer to this is "yes, but..." A good analogy would be trying to learn to play the violin by using an instruction book alone. The fact is, one might be able to master the basics and get a leg up on some of the more advanced techniques. But in learning remote viewing, just as in learning most other subtly complex skills, it is hard to beat a good "live" instructor. And any means of learning the skill, be it a "live" teacher or a book, requires hard work and practice for success. Still, the manual has been the starting point for many a person who has gone on to become competent.

Now, with a whole new generation in the civilian world becoming aware of remote viewing and its potential, some things have changed and others remain the same. For one thing, the name has changed: In the interest of historical continuity this manual still bears the title "Coordinate Remote Viewing." However, the methodology is now referred to as "Controlled Remote Viewing." It's initials are still 'CRV,' but the new term was adopted at the request of Ingo Swann, who felt it reflected better the purpose behind the process, which is to enable normal human beings to better control a faculty that is notoriously flighty and often hard to manage. In that respect, nothing has changed!

In one final note, included with this manual for the first time are actual remote viewing sessions executed using the CRV process. One is a Stage III session done by me during my own CRV training and excerpted from the recently-released CIA Star Gate Archives exactly as I produced it in 1984. The second is a session of much more recent vintage from one of my students. This will enable the reader to compare what has been learned in the pages of the manual, with how it has been executed in real life. Enjoy!